Friday, October 7, 2011

Al Gore is doing a disservice to science by overplaying the link between climate change and weather | Myles Allen

12:28 PM | Posted by Free Game Zone | | Edit Post

To say we are causing weather would not have been possible without the influence of man is simply not true

When Al Gore said last week that scientists now have "clear evidence that climate change is directly responsible for the storm and floods and extreme drought, which has displaced millions of people this years, "My heart sank. After suggesting the idea of ??"attribution of events" in 2003, and co-author of a study published earlier this year about the origin of flooding in the UK in autumn 2000, I suspect that it may be one of the scientists spoken.

Gore is right that is in principle possible to quantify the role of human influence on climate in particular weather, and it must involve the probability of how human influences "charged climate dice "to a particular event is more likely? These issues can be resolved, because of climate change impacts are largely felt by the risk of extreme climate change, the answers matter. People have a right to know how climate change affects, and will not be passed on to platitudes like "it's the kind of event that could be expected to become more frequent."

But the fact that there is a method for determining whether a statement is true does not mean it's true, let alone someone did the study to find out. To my knowledge, the granting of formal probabilistic analysis have been published in two facts: the 2003 heat wave in Europe and the fall of 2000, floods in the UK. Both studies found the human influence on climate was most likely increased risk of the event in question, but in the case of floods in autumn 2000 was found in 10 chance that the increase was modest 20 % or less. And a follow-up study just published in the Journal of Hydrology, Alison Kay and co-authors, using the same data to search for factors that influence the risk of flooding in the spring of 2001 hypothetical. They found that emissions of greenhouse gas emissions have actually reduced the risk of flooding conditions. Understandable, since spring floods in the UK tend to result from the melting snow, thanks to the greenhouse effect now, there is less snow around

This illustrates an important point: human influence on climate is most likely a few events, and some less likely, and science is a difficult question to find out what this. Randy Dole and his colleagues found no evidence of human influence, which increases the risk of heat wave of 2010 in Russia, the jury is still flooding in Pakistan, and broke into chaos when the Hurricane Katrina. So when Gore says. "The environment in which all storms form has changed," is not really a lie, but it needs to be misunderstood
The claim that we "paint more points on the dice," causing extreme weather events that simply could not occur in the absence of human influence on climate, is simply false. Given the scarcity of reliable and bias in climate models, it is impossible to say whether an observed event could happen in a hypothetical pristine environment. Our research focuses on quantifying how the risks have changed, which is agreement much easier, despite all the uncertainty that makes the work of the "relative risk" in a case laborious.


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